I'm still not sure how I feel about the rest of the Dead Man's Bones album, but I absolutely love this song; and they--despite this being an incomplete performance of the song--look like they'd put on a good show.

October 26, 2009

Cooking them well is all it takes. Eric Ripert still remembers the oyster mushrooms when he was a young cook at Robuchon's 3-star Jamin. He had to cook each one individually to get that perfect sear. That's what it takes, that's what makes the difference.

I usually cook a handful of mushrooms along with some butter, salt, pepper, and thyme; but I might need to try this one-at-a-time method to get them just right, because a perfectly-cooked mushroom sounds delicious.

Histoire de Melody Nelson is, indeed, one of my favorite albums of all time, but this weekend I spent some time with some of my other favorite Gainsbourg--and Gainsbourg-related--albums, any of which would be perfect for someone who loves Melody:

I'd written a 15-line Perl script that, run from the command line, produced JSON output with the coordinates of some photos.

I wanted to plot those photos on a Google map, and in fact had already written the Javascript to do so, given a copy/paste JSON dump of the output of my script.

I wanted to connect the Perl script and the Javascript using something other than copy/paste of the JSON output.

Here's what I did: I converted my Perl script into a PSGI app by adding around, oh, 4 lines of Perl code. I then ran that script as a webserver using plackup, and converted my Javascript to pull the JSON data via Ajax (using jQuery) from that webserver.

This was something like 10x easier than writing a CGI script, and probably 100x easier than writing an Apache/mod_perl app. And here's the amazing part: by writing it with PSGI, I wrote both a CGI and Apache/mod_perl app, as well as an app that'd run cleanly in a non-blocking server like Perlbal, since it does no I/O.